The second-highest grossing Chinese film of all time, Operation Red Sea has earned over a half-billion dollars since its release this past February. Writer/director Dante Lam introduced the film at a New York Asian American Film Festival screening on June 30 and accepted the festival’s Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema. Operation Red Sea is loosely drawn from the real-life evacuation of Chinese hostages during the 2015 civil war in Yemen. In the movie version, Jiaolong, an elite task force, not only have to free hostages, they must also stop an attempt to sell yellowcake uranium to terrorists […]

What is producing? I ask myself this question a lot, and the title on my business card literally reads “Producer.” I’m staff at a rad women-run studio in Brooklyn while also producing my own films as well as a handful of others. I say all this to reiterate just how amorphous the craft of producing can be. Because of its fluidity, it can also be a challenge to learn how to be better at it. Plus, producers rarely get interviewed in the industry articles that offer insights into filmmaking process. When they are featured, producing technique can be difficult to […]

Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski know what IFP Week is like. They know what it’s like to pitch a passion project. They even know what it’s like when time — in Jenkin’s case, several years — elapses between features. When the writer/director and producer, respectively, of Moonlight swung by this year’s Filmmaker Talks day at IFP Week, it was a kind of victory lap. After all, their last film together took home three Oscars, including Best Picture, on top of a towering pile of other accolades. But they used their talk with moderator Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker‘s Editor-in-Chief, to remember when life was […]

“It’s going be called ‘Indie Film is Dead,’” I remember Ted Hope saying to me back in 1995. He was referring to an article he was submitting for that fall’s magazine, a many-thousand-word takedown of the business practices and internalized logic of the specialty film business. Hope, a prolific producer who had worked with Ang Lee and Hal Hartley, was a frequent contributor to Filmmaker in our early days, writing pieces like one on how to interview a production designer or another on the job of the production manager. But this piece would be different. Here’s the lede: “The marketplace […]

In 2014 I spoke with Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, respectively the writer/director and co-director/co-writer/producer of Loving Vincent, an animated film about the final days of Vincent Van Gogh’s life that was then in preproduction. Three and a half years and much blood, sweat and tears later the film is complete and premiered at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival last week. It’s been gaining attention since its initial failed Kickstarter campaign (a second go was more successful) for its production method, with a team of artists creating each frame in the style of Van Gogh with oil paint on canvas, the […]

One of my favorite virtual reality pieces at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival was the animated Invasion! from San Francisco-based Baobab Studios. The short film, directed by Baobab co-founder Eric Darnell, was reportedly downloaded over one million times (including in my household, where my kids loved its Google Cardboard version), making it the most-downloaded virtual reality piece yet, and in September a feature film adaptation was announced. Baobab thus had a high bar for their next project, so they launched two: Asteroids!, which premiered at Sundance in January, and now Rainbow Crow, which premiered this year at Tribeca. Following in the kid-friendly tradition of Darnell’s […]

Driving down Beverly, you head opposite Hollywood, away from Studio City, toward the nondescript, single-level, brown-bricked building that’s the literal Blumhouse — the offices of horror movie maestro Jason Blum. Since founding the company, Blum has produced dozens of films that have made varying degrees of impact on the zeitgeist: the found-footage scares of the Paranormal Activity films, the reinvented haunted house of the Insidious pictures, the social violence of The Purge series. And then, of course, there’s megahit Get Out, Jordan Peele’s ferociously intelligent satire on racism that, despite its share of lobotomies and knifings and violently applied white […]

Longtime Filmmaker readers will instantly recognize writer/director Matt Ross as our former Managing Editor, whose intelligent and probing interviews with directors like Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney — to say nothing of his sit-down with critic Armond White — were staples in this publication in the early to mid-aughts. In 2006, Ross, who had made two short films and written a pair of scripts left the magazine to go make his debut feature, the darkly compelling Frank & Lola. A Vegas-set psychosexual love story, Frank & Lola stars Michael Shannon as an ambitious, tightly-wound star chef working in […]

Most people know Tom Hanks as a two-time Oscar winning actor. Some would recognize him as the sometimes-director behind works including That Thing You Do!, and others know him simply as his often-nickname “America’s Dad.” But the beloved actor may not be as well known as one of Hollywood’s top producers, with 50 producing credits to his name from Band of Brothers to My Big Fat Greek Wedding to Olive Kitteridge. The actor, who recently picked up a lifetime achievement award at the Rome Film Fest, takes a hands-on role as producer in his own films and those of others, beyond just attaching his […]

When legendary producer and studio executive Robert Evans penned his autobiography — later adapted into a documentary — he picked a telling title: The Kid Stays in the Picture. You would think that after producing films like Chinatown and Urban Cowboy, Evans could happily rest on his laurels, but his book’s title, with its defiant use of the present tense, speaks to the ambitions and anxieties affecting every filmmaker with producer DNA. These, of course, are issues of continuing relevance and professional durability — or, to use the independent film parlance of the moment, sustainability. Contrary to the imagination of […]